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HPL

The High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark is the tool used to calculate the performance of a distributed memory computer. It is the software package from which the numbers listed on the top500 list are derived.

The basic BCCD image is not distributed with HPL or the requisite linear algebra libraries. This page will describe the process for compiling and running the HPL benchmark with the BCCD.

HPL as pre-loaded on the BCCD

As of March 25, 2010, the HPL source and build scripts tailored to the BCCD are included in the bccd user's home directory. To build and run, follow these simple steps:

$ cd ~/hpl
$ make
$ /bin/bash hpl.run

Note, however, that this will run HPL over all of the nodes in the current BCCD cluster. So if you're in a lab with other students, be kind to them and edit the hpl.run script to reduce the number of processes in use.

HPL from scratch

Prerequisites

As of this writing, version 2.0 (September 10, 2008) was the most recent stable version, and was used below.

A BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) implementation such as ATLAS

As of this writing, version 3.8.3 (February 18, 2009) was the most recent stable version, and was used below.

The BCCD

Compiling

The compiling stage can take a very long time, depending on your hardware. The ATLAS configure/compile scripts run a large suite of tests to determine the best configuration for your system. On a 1.6GHz dual-core Atom with 2GB of RAM, this stage took a number of hours.

Create a directory to work in, and unpack the software

$ mkdir hpl
$ tar xf atlas3.8.3.tar.gz
$ tar xf hpl-2.0.tar.gz

We'll compile ATLAS first, since HPL will need to link its binaries to those libraries.

There should now be a binary in bin/Linux_PII_CBLAS along with an HPL.dat

$ cd bin/Linux_PII_CBLAS
$ ls
HPL.dat xhpl

Running

HPL.dat is the file that controls how HPL is going to conduct the tests. It can often take quite a bit of experimentation to get the optimal settings. This page from ACT can help quite a bit, as can the HPL FAQ and the HPL Tuning guide.